Reporter's Notebook

Readers around the world share their uncertainties and fears about a Trump presidency. If you’re a non-American in a country outside the U.S. and would like to add your perspective, please send us a note (especially if your country isn’t mentioned yet): hello@theatlantic.com.

A Muslim woman in Lagos, Nigeria, on November 10 reads a newspaper with the headline "Trump shocks the world.”Sunday Alamba / AP

Last month, a reader in Nigeria named Shayera Dark sent us a long note criticizing the culture of political correctness in the U.S. Her smart polemic didn’t have a place in Notes at the time, but after we began this reader series on global reactions to Trump’s victory, I thought of Shayera, so I asked her what she thinks of the U.S. election. Her response isn’t easily categorized:

As a woman, Hillary’s loss was a great disappointment. She came prepared but lost to an egomaniac. I believe Trump’s win only reinforces toxic masculinity and meanness. You can be a straight shooter without being odious.

The day after the election, I did a vox pop [an interview with members of the public] in a cafe in Lagos. Most people were surprised and disappointed that Trump won, but they didn’t think his presidency would affect Nigeria substantially. They had a let’s-wait-and-see view.

Personally, I think Trump’s presidency might be a boon for Africa. Say he decides to cut aid to the continent: That could be the beginning of the end of Nigeria’s perpetual debt cycle, and then perhaps true representation via taxation will finally take root. Nigerian leaders would be forced to listen to electorates instead of foreign donors.

Also, if he refuses to honour trade agreements, trade restrictions across the continent may loosen, and with free movement of goods and people comes the opportunity for African countries to grow their economies.

What else could a Trump presidency mean for Nigeria? He didn’t discuss Nigeria or sub-Saharan Africa on the campaign trail, so there’s not much to go on. Some Nigerians are worried he might pull support to fight Boko Haram. A secessionist group hoping to restore Biafra—a region of southeast Nigeria that existed as an independent republic between 1967 and 1970—cheered Trump’s victory. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa—about 40 percent of Nigerians follow Islam—so they could be impacted by the Muslim ban that Trump campaigned on (but whose top advisors have dialed backfollowing the election).

If you live in Nigeria, or sub-Saharan Africa more generally, and you’d like to share your take on the U.S. election, please send us a note. In the meantime, here’s that pre-election note from Shayera critiquing PC culture—a common sentiment of Trump voters in this popular Notes thread:

I’ll start this piece with a confession: I am Nigerian, not American, and I’ve never stepped foot in America. But I do follow American politics and culture enough to know a consummate salesman/former reality show host and a lawyer/former first lady/senator/secretary of state are both running for president. I’ve heard and read enough of Donald Trump’s empty speeches and sexist utterances to know he will feel right at home in Nigeria’s political sphere, where a senator allegedly threatened a female colleague with rape and the president’s speechwriter cribbed President Obama’s 2008 victory speech to launch President Buhari’s #ChangeBeginsWithMe campaign. So much for change.

As an observer of American culture, I’m intrigued by America’s obsession with political correctness and it’s knack for taking offense in everything and anything.

The word “fat” is a slight, and has now been replaced by the vague phrase “plus size.” But plus to what size? By that definition, “size” is the norm, and women (and I say women, because I’ve never heard men being called plus size) who fall outside this “size” range are the exception. The average American woman is a size 16, and it’s confusing that fashion labels and designers continue to use “plus size” to describe what is the rule. If anything, those models on their catwalks should be called “minus size.” (If minus size sounds ridiculous to you, so should plus size.)

In Nigeria, though, fat is just another neutral adjective used in the same manner as short, tall, slim, or dark. In contrast with American culture, women with large hips and thick thighs are celebrated and regarded as the norm. Which is why hip-less women like me—women who are slimmer than the national average—get teased. I’ve been called skinny (lepka, in local parlance) and I’ve had people, mostly women, tell me to put on weight because men prefer women with curves, as if satisfying the male gaze is a legitimate goal I should strive for.

Still, while I’d prefer not to hear such remarks, I know not to raise hell over it, because in the grand scheme of things it’s not worth my time or energy. It doesn’t have an impact on my life, unlike the menace of traditional gender roles.

Speaking of gender roles, the outcry by non-binary people in America who want to be referred to as “ze,” “sie,” “hir,” “co,” or “they” seems misplaced. Surely, we all want to be free from the constraints of gender and be recognised as human beings with individuals with distinct tastes and preferences, but using confusing pronouns or identifiers doesn’t solve the bias. (Imagine the confusion it would cause if, in the aftermath of a terror attack, law enforcement officers use “zie” or “co” to describe the suspect-at-large.) Traditional pronouns exist because human physiognomy is either female or a male. As such, shirking them is unlikely to bring relief, since their implicit meanings and the baggage they bare will still be applied to non-binary people based on how they look.

Another curious word making the rounds in American culture is cultural appropriation. I remember my bemusement at the story about the black women who had confronted a white man over his dreadlocks, accusing him of appropriating black culture. Now, if a white person choose to twist and leave their hair uncombed for years, I don’t see that as a problem, especially since black women have no qualms attaching Peruvian, Indian, and Brazilian hair to their heads.

And if black fashion designers, like British-Ghanaian Ozwald Boateng, can make money off Western-styled clothing, why can’t Marc Jacobs’ white models rock dreadlocks on the catwalk? Granted, white America continues to view blacks with dreadlocks as untidy, weed-smokers, and unprofessional, but decrying whites who want to rock the style is as ineffective in the fight against prejudice as trigger warnings. Most of us wear jeans, but when was the last time any construction worker or person with the same complexion as Levi Straus and Jacob W. Davis cry cultural appropriation?

Like bed bugs, trigger warnings and microaggressions have infested colleges all across America. With professors now duty-bound to warn thin-skinned students about offensive texts before proceeding with their lectures, one has to wonder if this is a conspiracy to create a generation of Trumps, who would protest every slight, both real and perceived, and demand their fragile egos be stroked and coddled at all times.

To my mind, microaggression is the PC term for intolerance. It is a word that lily-livered students have used to bar people with contrary views from speaking on campuses or silence differing opinions in lecture theatres. It is also another meaningless word minimizing the pain and horrors of prejudice because there’s nothing “micro” about prejudice. If something is racist or sexist, whether it’s covert or apparent, call it by its name.

Choosing to see injustice in everything is a mark of low self-esteem and victimhood. Power is choosing not to react in the way the offender intended. It means learning to differentiate between thoughtless jibes and nefarious actions and policies, and knowing where to invest one’s energies. Because senseless indignation is just that: senseless.

Update from another Nigerian reader, Abimbola, who is worried about our safety, not safe spaces:

I currently live in Lagos, Nigeria, and I believe in American democracy because I consider it to be sweet and fair. The Obama administration has been successful in upholding the core values of the States: freedom and unification of all peoples. However, the results of the recent polls have left me traumatized because of all the prejudice and bullying going on (before and after the polls). The ugly meme of bullying was instrumental to the success of the GOP. I fear that bullying and violence will continue to be employed more than ever as a means to a destructive end.

Another reader, Ebuka:

I am proudly Nigerian, not American, and I have personally loved the Clintons since Bill’s Presidency in my childhood. I supported and rooted for Hillary instead of Donald Trump, who I felt was not prepared to lead. The Donald lost all three debates, which I stayed awake to watch, but he managed to nip the electoral college due to the very divisive political rhetoric he championed focused on protectionism and anti-globalisation, thus awakening the angry nature of the majority of the electorate in decisive states.

I have great respect and admiration for President Obama and see him as the most popular icon of the 21st Century and a role model for African leaders, the black race, and the world at large. (I am biased in my assessment of him, as I was one of the beneficiaries of his flagship Young African Leaders Initiative, now the Mandela Washington Fellowship.) He has had a scandal free and largely successful Presidency and I wish him, Michelle, and the kids a beautiful life.

The Obama Presidency definitely affected Africa and Nigeria in very specific ways. (America always affects us.) First, the U.S. purchase of Nigerian crude has become negligible in the last few years, and this has impacted every Nigerian (wealthy, middle and low income) through the adverse effect on our exchange rates to the dollar and the unavailability of the greenback for various transactions which feed our import dependent lifestyle. Obama killed oil prices and Trump may bury it further with increased production (shale) and the increased focus on coal as an alternative.

In the area of defence and security, Nigeria citizens continue to suffer somewhat from the effects of the refusal to sell or authorise the purchase of American arms in the fight against Boko Haram. Trump’s policy in this respect remains largely unknown.

In the run up to the 2015 Nigerian Presidential elections, there was also a tacit feeling amongst Nigerians that the Obama administration supported Nigeria’s incumbent President and eventual winner of that election, even though no direct proof of this exists. Nigerians, however, continue to bear the brunt of an inept government which has failed to provide economic leadership and seems bent on settling old political scores. The killing of Shitte Muslims and pro-Biafra protestors in their hundreds is unprecedented and is beginning to attract condemnation from the U.S. Mission and questions from the ICC which is a departure from the past.

Although the trajectory of a Trump Presidency on Nigeria remains largely unknown and is dependent on his choice of Secretary of State, the United States continues to wield considerable influence on Nigeria and must be seen as a force for good for millions of Nigerians in need of a voice against hunger and repression.

One more reader:

I’m Nigerian, a medical student of the University of Ibadan, and in a weird way the American election has always being more fascinating to me and my group of friends than our local election (maybe I live in a bubble but who knows). Election night we stayed up to see the results, fell asleep, and woke up to a Trump win.

But now, I realise I just don’t care because it doesn’t directly affect me. I don’t think America is the best run country—I’m most likely to choose to live in Europe than to live in the USA—but I did hold the USA up as a paragon of democracy, so I never expected Trump to even win, because his rhetoric is completely undemocratic.

The Trump presidency is likely to worsen the African political landscape by legitimizing autocratic regimes. With the caveat being we don’t know how the Trump presidency will turn out, it could also give certain corrupt practices free rein, based on the way Trump’s family and business interests are linked with his presidency. (Note: I always thought tax declarations and creating a blind trust to run your finances were a requirement.) Nigerians look to the USA for an idea of what is politically acceptable, and well, if Trump, does something wrong ...

A Clarin newspaper with a headline reading "Trump was winning and U.S begins an era that shocks the world" is delivered outside a building in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 9, 2016.Natacha Pisarenko / AP

Our latest look around the world takes us to Argentina:

Hello, I’m Boris from Buenos Aires, and I want to bring a different Latin American (South America) perspective to the U.S. elections, if my knowledge allows it. This was a year of deep changes to the region, as exactly 12 months ago Mauricio Macri won against Peronist heir Daniel Scioli in a upset election. Then were the elections in Peru and the ouster of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. And now the world is changing again, with two important questions for the Southern Cone that a Trump’s victory raises.

The first one is the hemispheric question. Macri’s slogan last year was “to open Argentina to the world,” especially with the United States. The “PJ,” the Peronist party, was protectionist like Trump and an ally of Russia and China. When Macri won, Obama visited Buenos Aires as Bill Clinton did it two decades ago. Susana Malcorra, our secretary of state, wished publicly on Monday for a Hillary Clinton presidency.

After Rousseff's impeachment a couple of months ago, Michel Temer [the new president of Brazil] and Macri developed an understanding to join the regional bloc, Mercosur, to a free trade zone such as the Pacific Alliance, TPP, or a free trade deal with the U.S. and the E.U. Now nobody know what will happen because with the last Republican U.S. president, Washington basically forgot about the region except to fight with Venezuela. Two important governments in dire need (both Macri and Temer face great internal opposition that has Russia’s backing) are seeing how their principal path to victory is closing because of bad timing.

The second question is the migrants. While Latin America is pictured as Central America in the U.S. media, the Southern Cone is a net receiver of migrants since the XIX century (most emigrants are middle- and upper-class citizens). Residency and a path to citizenship are a constitutional right granted to all people who want to live and work in our soil.

My grandfather’s family escaped Bulgaria before WWII and were rejected in the U.S. because of quotas, so they came to Argentina. Today Argentina is the destination of migrants who don’t take a northern path to the U.S. and the E.U.—a lot of migrants and refugees from Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, Senegal, Guinea, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Will this flow increase if the U.S. closes its borders? I predict that it will, since after the E.U. started their Mediterranean operations, more Africans risked an trans-Atlantic voyage to Brazil’s and our shores.

Even without that, politicians and journalist have noticed the success of fact-free xenophobic discourse that Trump mainstreamed, so now it’s expanding. The Senate majority leader for the PJ, Pichetto, is talking about how Peru is sending all their criminals and riff-raff to our country and that must be stopped. Lanata, a prestigious journalist who uncovered the kickbacks scheme of our previous president, Cristina Kirchner, is now filling his show with attacks to immigrants and how they are bankrupting the nation.

So, even before Trump take office, he has already changed our region for the worse.

Update on 9/21: Josh Marshall is on a blog tear over a major office building in Buenos Aires being constructed by Trump and his Argentine partners:

According to a report out of Argentina, when Argentine President Mauricio Macri called President-Elect Trump to congratulate him on his election, Trump asked Macri to deal with the permitting issues that are currently holding up the project. This comes from one of Argentina’s most prominent journalists, Jorge Lanata, in a recent TV appearance.

As TPM’s Catherine Thompson noted back in August, Macri’s father Franco had dealings with Trump in the early 1980s when the elder Macri (a construction tycoon) tried to break into the New York real estate business. Indeed, things got so intense between Franco Macri and Trump that when Mauricio (the current President) was kidnapped and thrown into a coffin by unknown kidnappers, Franco Macri at first thought Trump was responsible for the kidnapping.

Yes, I’m not kidding about this.

Gone are the days of No Drama Obama.

My colleague Marina has more on “questions over how Trump will keep his business interests separate from his work as president.”

These past 12 months have been grueling, os maybe talking it out could be a good thing. I’m Brazilian, and though I have had my share of international experience, I never lived in the U.S. I’ve got many American friends and coworkers, and my first boss when I was a trainee was from the U.S. Being a millennial and having grown up in the Information Age also exposed me pretty early on to American culture and values. So I guess I do have some familiarity in the end despite having only been there as a visitor.

I am somewhat removed from what’s happening over there. And yet I have to say that the shocking events of the past few months in U.S. politics have had a much stronger impact on me than I thought it would and, according to friends, should. The growth of populism in the U.S. (and in Europe, as Brexit shows) has been much more disheartening to me than the recent cycle we had in Brazil (and Latin America as a whole) for the past 14 years. Because while populist cycles have come and gone in Latin America, the harm it caused was mostly to itself. Sadly, the harm populism can cause in the heart of a hegemonic power will be felt far from its borders and long after its time.

I may be an exception amongst the educated in Latin America, many of whom look at the U.S. through ideologically tinted glasses, but I do feel America is the single greatest force for good in the world, despite its failings. Modern liberal democracy owes its very existence to the foresight of people such as James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin. Their system of checks and balances was cleverly designed precisely to hold populistic waves at bay, lest an eventual majority would compromise the rights of future generations. They understood all too well elections in itself don’t make a democracy, as so many buffoons such as Hugo Chavez insisted. It is of utmost importance to put a check on the tyranny of the majority.

Sadly, this whole system was somehow diluted and weakened over the past few decades due to the overreach of executive power overseen by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, and it didn’t see enough restraining from Obama in the following years.

I do understand what put Trump in power was the widening income gap between uneducated blue-collar whites and the urban liberal and cosmopolitan elite. I do understand all to well how income inequality is a fertile ground for populism, having witnessed it first hand in Brazil and Latin America. I get the generational divide and economic tectonic shift that left so many behind in rural America. It’s the story of a popular backlash against an out-of-touch establishment, but then again, so was fascism in Europe in the early XX century. In fact, most historic tragedies can be rationally explained. It doesn't make them justifiable.

I am not insensitive to the blue-collar worker's plight, but if you want to justify this, it’s somewhat easy to justify the rise of ISIS on Syria as well. The grievance is legitimate, but it doesn’t make the reaction valid. And that popular reaction in the U.S. has sadly meant an ugly spectacle: xenophobia, racism, sexism, self-righteous anger, and bigotry.

And finally, the death knell of any democratic regime: the end to reasoned debate. Are Trump supporters necessarily xenophobic and sexist? Certainly no. Some are, but I’d like to believe they are a minority. However, it cannot be denied that Trump succeeded in his campaign despite such vitriol. That such ideas have become something to be glossed over in a president to so many Americans is nothing short of a tragedy. The world is a darker, less safe place than I used to think. Maybe I was naive before, but now it’s hard to miss the historical parallels.

Finally, another disturbing consequence of this election is who actually becomes the world’s most powerful man in the end. I have this nagging feeling it’s not really Trump, but Vladimir Putin—a man who is highly intelligent, but also dangerous, and shares none of the values so many in the West have grown to take for granted. The thought of a world in which Putin can move unchecked on smaller states without any opposition from America is frightening.

I may be in Brazil and somewhat geographically removed from all of that, but I care deeply about liberal values, individual rights, and its advancement the world over. The world doesn’t seem to be heading in that direction anymore.

An Indian man in Kolkata reads a Bengali language newspaper with "Trumped" on the front on November 10, 2016.Bikas Das / AP

Our first reader note from the subcontinent is from Jaiganesh:

Last Wednesday morning was a shock not only to the U.S., but to the whole world. While leaders of world nations voiced passive aggressive congratulatory messages, the global community watched in horror as President-elect Trump gave his victory speech. Then the world stock markets dipped, gold prices surged, the Mexican peso took a nose dive, and we witnessed the first fallout of a potentially free trade restrictive America in making.

India was already recovering from Prime Minister Modi’s retaliation against corruption while the U.S. was still up for grabs. To put it delicately, India was in denial. The immensely young Indian population was astonished to find a reality TV show joke on his way to the White House.

Why was there such a reaction from us, and the rest of the world? Why did the majority of the Indian population found it implausible to believe that Trump was now the President–elect of the United States? Here’s why.

Like most people, we did not pause to reflect on the human factor involved in elections. We did not consider Trump’s aggressive message against the Washington establishment from a white working-class U.S. citizen point of view. And like all the polls, we underestimated the silent Trump supporters who carried him to the Oval Office.

To put it simply, the U.S. works perfectly in the eyes of young Indians, with its lucrative job and business opportunities for the well-educated, liberal, and “Western” culture that most young Indians try to embrace, and the global leadership role the U.S. plays. We never understood the difficulties of middle-class American families faced in getting their kids to college—a privilege that middle-class Indians took for granted. We failed to comprehend that such a significant portion of our high-paying jobs were originally created for U.S. citizens. The cheap technical expertise of Indian college graduates brought millions of jobs to the country at the cost of U.S. jobs. This is all very much true; Donald Trump is not wrong.

A global community based on U.S. post-WWII military alliances was stunned by the very probable withdrawal of U.S. interventionist foreign policy. A nation that nurtured a bipartisan foreign policy to act as the world’s police for several decades was now crawling behind walls and closing its economic borders. A nation to which Indians looked up, a nation which Indian progressives and liberals wanted India to follow, is now taking a step back from global leadership, from standing as a pillar of nuclear non-proliferation, from leading by example in constitutional rights.

It is a gloomy day for our women to watch the great glass ceiling to go unbroken. My mother—who never followed global news enough to properly name the presidential candidates—was disappointed to watch Hillary give her concession speech. Seeing a women finally clinch the U.S. presidency would have been a moment of great satisfaction and motivation that the world’s female community lost to an isolationist America. When the world expected the U.S. to take a step forward, it took ten steps back.

India shares a lot of the populist lack of trust in the incumbent establishment with the U.S. electorate. We want change badly; our scope of progress hinges on it. And yet, this is somehow not the change that we want to see in our country. We want to see India move forward as a global superpower, and this election is going feed the fear of stepping out in Indian citizens, if they even have such a notion. We also share the diverse culture of the U.S., with a large Muslim population that makes us relate to the need for inclusiveness and religious equality that India is struggling to establish.

I am an electrical engineer, to nobody’s surprise, and I believe in the preservation of our environment. Hillary Clinton’s view of the U.S. being the Clean Energy Superpower would have been a defining moment for India, which still fails to implement even the most basic of carbon footprint control measures. It is horrifying to realize that the president-elect of the United States believes that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese.

To sum it all up, the U.S. just disappointed half the world, including more than half of its voting population.

Another reader in India, Tarun, goes more into the Modi comparisons:

As an Indian national with generally liberal values, this feels like a play by play of the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi in 2014, complete with the decent-with-caveats economic performance of the prior government and the seemingly inexplicable anti-establishment sentiment. I attended grad school in Boston, and even in that liberal bastion it was very hard, until six months ago, to explain how demagogic and un-qualified Modi is for the position. I remember the dean referring in his welcome to the opportunities created by Modi’s election, and I remember feeling like he was describing a country I did not recognise.

Please, please, please emphasise to your leaders our lessons after the fact. Despite three years of policy fumbling (especially in foreign policy which has been flat out chaotic) the major opposition—our Congress—has failed to make a coherent case for why they should come back to power. This is not for a lack of hitting the right “liberal” notes. The Congress’ spokespersons speak of globalism, women’s rights and minority rights fluently.

Their liberal bona fides, however, simply do not allow them to escape the fact that their party is built around the Gandhi family, which is their sole fund-raising apparatus and default provider of Prime Ministerial candidates. Inevitably, it is a relationship seeped in corruption and nepotism. When the Democratic Party effectively stepped aside for Mrs. Clinton’s coronation in the primaries, it showed itself to be a similar party.

There is of course plenty of sexism and racism to go around, but there are also enough voters who instinctively abhor such a mentality. Neither Modi nor Trump have won the popular vote nationally. But when liberal parties fall prey to this dynasty mentality, their core democratic populist appeal suffers in a way that conservative “blood-and-steel” appeal does not.

So, as bleak as this sweep looks, I hope American liberals do what Indian liberals have not: use the next four years to build a bench at the lowest levels of government and have them compete without the interference of the Democratic party machinery. The calls for a Michelle Obama candidacy are short-sighted and hypocritical. They are also a disservice to a very intelligent and qualified woman who will conceivably break herself trying to rescue a party unwilling to rebuild at the grassroots.

Thank you for doing a much more responsible job of reporting this election than the Posts Washington and Huffington. Stay safe and free.

A TV screen is pictured in front of the German share price index, DAX board, at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, on November 9, 2016.Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

For a primer on how precarious relations are between Germany and the U.S. following Trump’s win, don’t miss Frum’s piece from yesterday, “America’s Friendship With Europe Has Been Horribly Damaged”—and “nowhere,” he writes, “does the reaction look more dangerous than inside the most powerful state on the European continent, Germany.”

[Trump’s victory] up-ends German political assumptions about the United States, at a time when Germans are already ready to have those assumptions up-ended. The mighty German middle is becoming less mighty, discredited by Angela Merkel’s flung-open door to Middle Eastern refugees. Anti-refugee, pro-Putin forces are gaining strength at the expense of the parties of the center. Two-thirds of Germans oppose a fourth term for Merkel.

Merkel has backed herself into a crazy political dead-end. She is identifying an open-door immigration policy as the foundation of her kind of liberalism—even as, in reality, large-scale immigration is helping destroy liberalism across the countries of Europe, and even within Germany itself. Warning that a Trump-led United States might not espouse values of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal human dignity amounts to a passport for Germany out of the U.S. alliance.

Three German readers sent us dispatches from Deutschland last week reacting to Trump’s win and what it might mean for their country. My favorite one is from this first reader, Dariusch, given his heterodox views:

I’m an (atheist) German-Iranian, born and raised in Germany, living in Berlin with a background in political science, currently owning a cafe and maintaining a one-person video production company. I’m a green left winger, critical of some aspects of globalisation and welcoming of others. Unlike many left wingers in Europe and Germany, I don’t have a black-white view of the world or the United States. Things are too complicated for that.

On the morning of November 9th, my girlfriend checked out a News alert on her phone and yelled out „Oh my god! Trump has won!“ I just broke out in hysterical laughter, because it seemed so unreal that a clown would be the next president of a country that shaped European and German culture and politics so tremendously over the past 70 years.

If Trump goes along with his foreign policy plans of not honoring NATO commitments in Europe, that might actually have positive effects over here, as this could be a driver for more inner-EU cooperation regarding the security architecture in our neighbourhood.

A common European army would make so much more sense politically and be more cost-effective as well. We need to emancipate from the U.S. and shape our own, independent foreign and security policy. A Trump presidency could drive this emancipation. Likewise, the protectionist economic agenda bears the potential for companies moving from the U.S. to Europe. But probably, these beneficial ripple effects will fail to materialize.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, right-wing anti-globalisation groups already start gaining momentum. After the elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in 2017, the reactionary ideology of returning to a pre-globalisation state and implement closed societies could be up for growing political gains. A President Le Pen would be bitterly opposed to any integration of the armies and is also a proponent of economic and cultural isolation. Same goes for Wilders in the Netherlands and that Hampelmann (Jumping Jack) in Austria, whose name I didn’t bother to remember. Those groups will gain ground and drive the old parties to more quickly embrace parts of these reactionary, dangerous and obsolete ideas to hold on to their dwindling power, as they already have before November 8th.

With Trump’s victory, right-wing demagogues in Europe will gain an upswing. Nothing good can come from a Trump presidency for Europe and Germany at this point. I’m really afraid that future historians will look at back to the year 2016 and say “That’s when the whole mess started”—like they said looking back on 1914 or even 1933 (but let’s not exaggerate until we have a good reason for it).

The U.S. is a deeply divided country, just like most parts of the Western world in this day. The overall positive developments of integrating societies, cultures and economies did not reach a large chunk of people who have been forgotten. This is the case everywhere, from Los Angeles to Kaliningrad. There are many deep dividing lines, along cities and the countryside, among race, wealth, religion and education.

From here, the United States don’t look like a coherent nation state. I think it’s time to rethink the political system. Two parties cannot adequately represent the diversity of opinions and people. They just form a wide compromise that nobody is really happy with. To me it seems completely strange, how the loser of the popular vote regularly moves into the White House. At the time of its foundation, the United States had the most advanced political system of the world, but 300 years later, it requires a major overhaul.

Here’s another reader, Angela (not Merkel):

From an October edition of the German tabloid Bild

As a German citizen living in Berlin and a political scientist by trade, I am deeply concerned about Donald Trump’s victory. In the evening hours of November 8 (CET), I watched a short segment on CNN International describing the voter turnout at a polling station in Florida. And when I saw the long line of young women and what I believed to be Cuban- or Mexican-Americans waiting patiently to cast their ballot, I went to bed quietly confident that Hillary Clinton would win. Would any of those young women vote for “Grab-them-by-the-…”-Trump?, I wondered to myself. Most certainly not. Would any of those Cuban- or Mexican-Americans vote for a candidate who promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? Most certainly not. And with so many people turning out to vote, I was sure Hillary Clinton would win. So I thought.

When I got up early in the morning on November 9, I realized I was mistaken. Throughout the day, I felt so frustrated and shocked that I couldn’t even bring myself to turn on the TV or the radio; I was still in denial.

Given what the now president-elect has said and done during his campaign, I am afraid that a Trump administration might adversely affect both Europe and Germany. I am afraid that Trump might undo the system of international organizations and alliances as we know it. He has declared NATO, which is a cornerstone of both German and European security, essentially dispensable, while heaping praise on authoritarian leaders. He doesn’t seem to care a lot about the rules which govern international relations and trade and which have served both the U.S. and Germany quite well for 70 years. And I am also afraid that German-American relations might take a turn for the worse as the president-elect has made no secret of his dislike for Angela Merkel and her immigration policy. And the German chancellor doesn’t seem to like Trump very much, either.

With the British Brexit vote in mind, I am amazed by the fact that the predictions of pollsters have been proven wrong once again. I am also quite amazed by the fact that a populist candidate got elected, after a divisive campaign full of brazen lies and insults—though I believe a similar thing might happen in Germany in 2017, when the federal parliament, the Bundestag, is due to be elected. Until then, the right-wing populists of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), who have been busy scaremongering ever since the refugee crisis began in autumn 2015, will do their best to spread even more fear of Muslims and Syrian refugees among the German population. I am pretty sure that they will eventually manage to lie their way into parliament.

It is very saddening to see that many Germans are unable or unwilling to recognize the not-so-hidden authoritarianism, antisemitism, and nationalism lurking beneath the AfD’s surface. And it is equally saddening to see that the United States, our friend and partner, whose troops once freed Western Germany from Nazi tyranny, with a democratic tradition so much longer than ours, now has a president-elect who is applauded by white supremacists and former Klansmen and who essentially declared “I alone can fix it” during his convention speech.

This doesn’t bode well for Europe, where right-wing populism has been on the rise in recent years, and it certainly doesn’t bode well for Germany. Right now, I am deeply worried about the future of Germany, the European Union, and the United States of America.

Here’s one more reader, Jörg, in the Frankfurt area. He’s mostly concerned about the environmental impact of a Trump presidency:

The European right-wing populist movements and “parties” and their ignorant and furious followers will see Mr Trump’s rise as a confirmation of their crude and equally ill-informed and mislead opinions—probably not in Germany (there is a hope left that enough people in this country retain a memory of the 1930s), but in France, Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, and others are a different matter. If they fall into the hands of these right-wing populists, Europe is going to lose all of its achievements in freedom, wealth, and true scientific and social enlightenment—in combination with Climate Change that could mean the end of civilisation as we have only just gotten to know it.

And so I come to something—Climate Change—that has great significance to us and should have much more importance to citizens everywhere, including the U.S. of America. The fact that it didn’t come up in any of the three “presidential debates” just proves how far removed you people in America are from the realities in this world. Trump has clearly no idea what is happening on this planet. No other single issue is going to affect all of us on this scale. All other decisions need to be based on this fast approaching super-crisis.

For reasons too complicated to mention here, European people (at least on the continent; the U.K. is for other complicated reasons a different matter, similar to U.S.) are more aware and better educated about scientific facts. If Trump disrupts the process of international accord on Climate Change—a fragile thing at best anyway—there is no telling what kind of rise of the average temperature will be possible. Time and speed is of the utmost crucial importance here; even a slowing down of the necessary basic structural changes could have terrible consequences. If Trump wants to stay ignorant of some basic facts of the world in which he lives in, on a personal level that is fine with all of us. But as the deciding force and power he represents now, he must grow up and stop his childish (or maybe senile) behaviour.

Now it is time for Europe (and other parts of the world) to fast become assertive, independent, and perhaps even strong. It seems that some of our politicians have seen this coming. Plans for a European army are emerging—a good start. Economy and finance must follow immediately, and a discussion about better and possibly more democratic structure is on the way.

Yes, we all have learned something about democracy from America (as America once learned from Europe). This election has taught us even (and once) more how a democratic system can be corrupted by groups and individuals egocentric enough and opposed to democracy. Thank you, America, for this. We will reflect deeply and thoroughly on this lesson.

Update from another reader, Eva:

Being a German-American (currently visiting my parents in Germany, and hearing/reading the news of both sides every day), David Frum’s article first interested me a great deal. His analysis of language in Merkel’s brief congratulatory statement the morning after the election hooked me. I am a linguist, well aware with practices used in formal statement. My linguistic background, especially the field of pragmatics, makes me a nerd sometime, plucking apart what people said, what they really said while, say, standing in line at the post office.

I was surprised by Frum’s remarks on perhaps Germany turning the tables, and not clinging to traditional positions of power. That it might be perceived as arrogance, or as patronizing. Just something that the U.S. isn’t used to very much.

While I read Frum’s article I thought huh, this is interesting—someone perceiving Merkel this way, from a tiny speech given under circumstances that were terribly uncomfortable. I do think there is some oversensitivity in Frum’s writing. Merkel is not “downgrading” the American-German relationship just because “its ties are deeper than with any country outside of the European Union.” I perceive this to be neutral, or even positively stressing how deep U.S.-German relations are. Perhaps it’s a German thing to always state the obvious the truth, when for many a “fluffing up” of reality as it really is, would be preferable. It really isn’t insulting. It’s the equivalent to you perhaps saying to a very good friend: “you know, after my mom and dad and grandmother and brother, you really are the closest and most important friend I have outside of immediate family.” It’s honest—not downgrading.

The other issue of concern is Merkel offering collaboration based on certain Western values that America and Germany share. They concern democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law, and the equality of people of all sexes regardless of origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views.

Frum is correct to perceive a “conditional” quality here—the two countries operating together as long as their work is based on those values. What crime is there here in Merkel being the one to point out the conditionality? Is it so terrible that a smaller country does not approve of everything and anything in the big and mighty country? Is it hurt pride?

Merkel doesn’t actually say anything here that should cause an outcry. The values she has just mentioned are at the core of U.S. identity. One would expect them to not be removed or broken, or that would mean the States breaking those commitments, or changing them significantly. Which indeed should cause the U.S. to cry out with shock and confusion.

Frankly, the many fabulous things that the U.S. have done for Germany over the course of history don’t really enter here, but Frum brings them up. A good cooperation, a genuine friendship, help that can never be overemphasized, especially in the years after WW2 and during the Cold War. But you can’t argue: we did all this for you for so long, so now you have to play along with whatever because you owe us and owe us forever. The Germans still have a spine and an inherent moral compass. Trump’s many incredibly offensive remarks about different races, and women, do not belong among those “shared values” between the U.S. and Germany.

I think Merkel is not arrogant or cocky. She simply knows—much as many a person enters a marriage—that certain things are desired but not necessary, some necessary at all costs, and some simply a deal breaker. Which of us entering a serious relationship does not have their deal breakers? Someone’s a smoker? Not religious? Not from same ethnic background? Away on his job too much? There are thousands of things that people view as “deal breakers.” It is good to know them in advance, and to stick by them. That is not cocky behavior. That is simply knowing yourself well, and knowing what you can live with in advance. Merkel is simply aware of the deal breakers. Those would be qualities that go against the shared familiar qualities of the West. Racism? Offensive, nonthinking language all the time? Sexist remarks (or even deeds?) I admire when someone knows their deal breakers and sticks by them.

I wanted so much to read more moderate articles, to believe that Trump is not at all bad. Every day I think about it, but it just doesn’t sit right. I can see certain talents and fortes and experience in him, but then moral issues—those of your inbuilt moral compass—just keep popping back up, and they simply are stronger. This president, may you like it or not, will always be the president who wants to grab women by the pussy. That, among other things, will never disappear. It showed his true colors. There are simply are no valid apologies for some of the things he has said.

I wish I could be nicely divided, in a gray area, but this time it doesn’t work that way. I don’t want my spine to bend. I want to listen to my moral compass. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror without guilt.

The morning after the U.S. presidential election, my colleague Krishnadev touched on the “striking parallels” between Trump’s victory and Brexit:

The polls tightened in the last few days before the vote. The establishment dismissed that as an aberration. While some citizens complained about being forgotten, about increased immigration, and a lack of meaningful jobs, elected officials spoke of the benefits of globalization and trade. [...] Although the political establishment and the chattering classes may have dismissed Trump’s chances, [he] had consistently predicted that he was “going to do something so special.” It will, he said, be “Brexit plus, plus, plus.” He was right.

We made a callout for non-American Atlantic readers who live outside the U.S. to share their reactions to the gobsmacking results of Election Day. (Use hello@theatlantic.com to share your own from abroad.) Here’s Martin with “a view from the U.K.”:

The reasons for Trump’s victory and for Brexit are rather similar: the revolt of the white provincial working class marooned in regions that were once the heavy industrial heartlands and where, for a century, communities shared a common culture and felt proud of their lives. Technology and globalisation destroyed these communities and the establishment parties who didn’t speak their language, didn’t hear them, and left them to rot.

Donald Trump shakes hands with Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage at a campaign rally in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 24, 2016. (Carlo Allegri / Reuters)

The phenomenon of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn is the revolt of a different group—leftish graduates and intellectuals. But there is one similarity with the Trump/Brexit movement: Both the Rust Belt and the Ivory Tower felt that the national conversation was not touching on what they, their friends, and their colleagues at work felt were the big issues.

In the case of British graduates, it’s the lack of affordable housing, the privatisation and monetisation of public services coupled with no consideration of the ethics, values, and purpose of these services. The establishment parties reduced the language to generic “political speak,” degraded the autonomy and judgement of professionals, and replaced them with management consultants’ reports, guidelines, and box ticking, leading to failure despite financial investment. This graduate revolt is also rooted in the everyday experience of those working in the frontline of public service.

Once Bernie and Corby voiced these concerns, the graduates turned up to town-hall meetings and turned up to vote. However, what Bernie-style politicians have failed to do is to find a language that connects with the Rust Belt communities. Unless they can find a way of doing this, Trump will last a long time and many more Trumps will spring up—even in Europe.

Are you British and want to share your personalized U.K.-centric view of Trump/Brexit, or of the U.S. election more generally? Drop us a note and we’ll include. (Other countries to come.)

Another reader flags a viral video from British comedian Tom Walker, seen below. Walker plays a news reporter named Jonathan Pie, who unleashes an impressive NSFW rant about his lack of surprise that Trump won: It’s a result of overreach by the far left in America, he insists. The annoying camerawork in the video and Pie’s overheated affect is a bit much, but those aspects might just be a satirical skewing of the Glenn Becks and YouTube ranters of the world. Check it out for yourself. He touches on Brexit and covers a lot of the points raised by the Trump voters and anti-Trump voters we’ve been hearing from in Notes:

Update from James, “a Canadian living in my adopted city London, where EU arrogant elites got slaughtered by the same heartland vote that propelled Trump to victory last week”:

Thanks to the EU, I barely recognise the London I originally came to live in, marry, etc. Elites have flushed out much if not most of the happy, mentally healthy British people who used to live/work/play here—replaced by a soul destroying METROPOLIS type society that’s too expensive to live; too depressing to play; but boy oh boy if work is all you live for, this is a form of heaven.

Similarly the EU has banned so many consumer products, replaced by EU standardised second-rate ones, that you get the distinct feeling you’re being set up to become a globalist servant. There’s literally nothing in it for everyday Brits but the destruction of their excellent culture, while getting denigrated constantly by the media.

Then to top it off, the Westminster government has been reduced to servant status itself, since the EU courts decide everything these days. No one even wants to be the prime minister here since Brexit. It’s one big shambles.

That said, I love the Brits, and if history shows us anything, they will come out of this as hilariously awesome as ever.

Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.

1.

To be a parent is to be compromised.You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.

Americans could learn from how drastically German society has moved away from the nadir of its history.

Recently, a visitor to a southern plantation wrote a viral tweet complaining about a guide who forced her to spend her vacation hearing about slavery. Some tourists at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Mount Vernon, The Washington Post reported last week, are posting negative reviews on TripAdvisor and elsewhere because of the barest mention of the African Americans who were forced to work at the third president’s home, creating much of the wealth that made the glories of Monticello possible.

As an American Jew from the South who has lived in Berlin for decades, I’ve been asked whether Americans, in contemplating a plantation home, Confederate statue, or some other monument to our nation’s slave past, should emulate the way Germans treat Nazi memorials. To which I respond: There aren’t any. Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them. Instead, it has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism.

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action.

Kelley Williams-Bolar, like Felicity Huffman, was punished for trying to get her children a better education.

A few months ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar started getting phone calls in the middle of the night, telling her she was on the news again. People were tagging her on Facebook and mentioning her on Twitter. “Honestly, I didn’t put the two together! I didn’t think other people would put the two together!” she told me this week.

The “two together” are Williams-Bolar and Felicity Huffman. Both are committed mothers of daughters. Both are working women. Both have become national-media sensations. Both are accused of committing crimes to obtain a better education for their children.

But Williams-Bolar and Huffman are not so much analogues as funhouse-mirror versions of each other, their stories of justice and injustice similar and yet distorted and converse. Huffman, who starred on Desperate Housewives, has admitted to paying $15,000 for a proctor to correct her daughter’s standardized-test scores. She was swept up in the “Varsity Blues” investigation into corruption, bribery, and fraud in elite-college admissions, and today she received a two-week sentence. A decade ago, Williams-Bolar was a single, black mother living in public housing. In 2011, the state of Ohio convicted and imprisoned her for falsifying her address to get her kids into better public schools. At Huffman’s sentencing hearing, a federal prosecutor cited Williams-Bolar’s case, calling prison the “great leveler.”

Twenty-five years ago, Friends anticipated a time that would both romanticize and mistrust the culture of work.

In an episode in the fourthseason of Friends, Monica, Rachel, Chandler, and Joey find themselves engaged in an argument: Chandler and Joey, they claim, know Monica and Rachel much better than the women know them. Before long, the debate devolves into a game-show-style quiz. The host: Ross, who delights in the job. The topic: the minutiae of the friends’ lives. The stakes (which have become, through a series of predictably zany events, incredibly high): If the women lose the game, they have agreed, they will trade apartments with Chandler and Joey.

The correct answers quickly proliferate; as friends who are basically family, these people know each other’s stories really, really well. “Joey had an imaginary childhood friend. His name was …?” / “Maurice!” / “Correct. His profession was …?” / “Space cowboy!”; “According to Chandler, what phenomenon ‘scares the bejeezus’ out of him?” / “Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance!”; “Rachel claims this is her favorite movie …” / “Dangerous Liaisons!” / “Correct. Her actual favorite movie is …?” / “Weekend at Bernie’s!”

In sports, and in life, Europe and the United States see their societies differently—just not in the ways you might expect.

Memphis, Tennessee, is known for lots of things: Elvis Presley and B. B. King, the blues and barbecue. All these things, and more. But not Grizzly bears.

I did not think much of this while on holiday from London when my wife and I escaped the city’s steaming, unbearable heat to look through the Memphis Grizzlies’ (gloriously air-conditioned) fan store. The Grizzlies are the city’s professional basketball team. Their mascot is Griz the Grizzly Bear. Their crest is a Grizzly bear. It’s all about the bear.

Puzzlingly, in one corner of the store were shirts and other merchandise for a team called the Vancouver Grizzlies—one whose name made much more sense. In fact, the two teams were the same franchise, which in 2001 relocated 1,900 miles, across an international border and three time zones. Vancouver had not been able to support a professional basketball team, so the Grizzlies left for Tennessee. This is not unique in American sports—even in Tennessee. In 1997, American football’s Houston Oilers moved to Nashville, where they played, incongruously, as the Tennessee Oilers before becoming the Tennessee Titans. The most absurd example remains the Jazz: a perfect name for a basketball team from New Orleans, where it was based; less so from Utah, where it now resides.

The U.S. is in the top tier of house sizes internationally—and it’s not just because of McMansions.

America is a place defined by bigness. It is infamous, both within its borders and abroad, for the size of its cars, its portions, its defense budget—and its houses.

Rightly so: U.S. houses are among the biggest—if not the biggest—in the world. According to the real-estate firms Zillow and Redfin, the median size of an American single-family home is in the neighborhood of 1,600 or 1,650 square feet. About five years ago, Sonia A. Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Georgia, was working on a book about land-use patterns in the U.S., and when she tracked down the average size of dwellings for about two dozen countries, the U.S. came out on top. Her comparisons were rough because she’d cobbled together her data from various sources, but she found that American living spaces had a good 600 to 800 square feet on most of the competition.

For many participants, the program that provides health care to millions of low-income Americans isn’t free. It’s a loan. And the government expects to be repaid.

The folded American flag from her father’s military funeral is displayed on the mantel in Tawanda Rhodes’s living room. Joseph Victorian, a descendant of Creole slaves, had enlisted in the Army 10 days after learning that the United States was going to war with Korea.

After he was wounded in combat, Joseph was stationed at a military base in Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with Edna Smith-Rhodes, a young woman who had recently moved to Boston from North Carolina. The couple started a family and eventually settled in the brick towers of the Columbia Point housing project. Joseph took a welding job at a shipyard and pressed laundry on the side; later, Edna would put her southern cooking skills to use in a school cafeteria. In 1979, Joseph and Edna bought a house in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for $24,000.

Ivanka was always Trump’s favorite. But Don Jr. is emerging as his natural successor.

The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich Trump knows his clientele.

Curtained-off “private boxes” line the wall opposite the bar, inside of which are beds, and women, and scales to weigh gold powder, the preferred method of payment for services rendered. Word of the restaurant’s off-menu accommodations spreads fast. “Respectable women” are advised by The Yukon Sun to avoid the place, as they are “liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings.”

Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.

1.

To be a parent is to be compromised.You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.

Americans could learn from how drastically German society has moved away from the nadir of its history.

Recently, a visitor to a southern plantation wrote a viral tweet complaining about a guide who forced her to spend her vacation hearing about slavery. Some tourists at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Mount Vernon, The Washington Post reported last week, are posting negative reviews on TripAdvisor and elsewhere because of the barest mention of the African Americans who were forced to work at the third president’s home, creating much of the wealth that made the glories of Monticello possible.

As an American Jew from the South who has lived in Berlin for decades, I’ve been asked whether Americans, in contemplating a plantation home, Confederate statue, or some other monument to our nation’s slave past, should emulate the way Germans treat Nazi memorials. To which I respond: There aren’t any. Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them. Instead, it has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism.

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action.

Kelley Williams-Bolar, like Felicity Huffman, was punished for trying to get her children a better education.

A few months ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar started getting phone calls in the middle of the night, telling her she was on the news again. People were tagging her on Facebook and mentioning her on Twitter. “Honestly, I didn’t put the two together! I didn’t think other people would put the two together!” she told me this week.

The “two together” are Williams-Bolar and Felicity Huffman. Both are committed mothers of daughters. Both are working women. Both have become national-media sensations. Both are accused of committing crimes to obtain a better education for their children.

But Williams-Bolar and Huffman are not so much analogues as funhouse-mirror versions of each other, their stories of justice and injustice similar and yet distorted and converse. Huffman, who starred on Desperate Housewives, has admitted to paying $15,000 for a proctor to correct her daughter’s standardized-test scores. She was swept up in the “Varsity Blues” investigation into corruption, bribery, and fraud in elite-college admissions, and today she received a two-week sentence. A decade ago, Williams-Bolar was a single, black mother living in public housing. In 2011, the state of Ohio convicted and imprisoned her for falsifying her address to get her kids into better public schools. At Huffman’s sentencing hearing, a federal prosecutor cited Williams-Bolar’s case, calling prison the “great leveler.”

Twenty-five years ago, Friends anticipated a time that would both romanticize and mistrust the culture of work.

In an episode in the fourthseason of Friends, Monica, Rachel, Chandler, and Joey find themselves engaged in an argument: Chandler and Joey, they claim, know Monica and Rachel much better than the women know them. Before long, the debate devolves into a game-show-style quiz. The host: Ross, who delights in the job. The topic: the minutiae of the friends’ lives. The stakes (which have become, through a series of predictably zany events, incredibly high): If the women lose the game, they have agreed, they will trade apartments with Chandler and Joey.

The correct answers quickly proliferate; as friends who are basically family, these people know each other’s stories really, really well. “Joey had an imaginary childhood friend. His name was …?” / “Maurice!” / “Correct. His profession was …?” / “Space cowboy!”; “According to Chandler, what phenomenon ‘scares the bejeezus’ out of him?” / “Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance!”; “Rachel claims this is her favorite movie …” / “Dangerous Liaisons!” / “Correct. Her actual favorite movie is …?” / “Weekend at Bernie’s!”

In sports, and in life, Europe and the United States see their societies differently—just not in the ways you might expect.

Memphis, Tennessee, is known for lots of things: Elvis Presley and B. B. King, the blues and barbecue. All these things, and more. But not Grizzly bears.

I did not think much of this while on holiday from London when my wife and I escaped the city’s steaming, unbearable heat to look through the Memphis Grizzlies’ (gloriously air-conditioned) fan store. The Grizzlies are the city’s professional basketball team. Their mascot is Griz the Grizzly Bear. Their crest is a Grizzly bear. It’s all about the bear.

Puzzlingly, in one corner of the store were shirts and other merchandise for a team called the Vancouver Grizzlies—one whose name made much more sense. In fact, the two teams were the same franchise, which in 2001 relocated 1,900 miles, across an international border and three time zones. Vancouver had not been able to support a professional basketball team, so the Grizzlies left for Tennessee. This is not unique in American sports—even in Tennessee. In 1997, American football’s Houston Oilers moved to Nashville, where they played, incongruously, as the Tennessee Oilers before becoming the Tennessee Titans. The most absurd example remains the Jazz: a perfect name for a basketball team from New Orleans, where it was based; less so from Utah, where it now resides.

The U.S. is in the top tier of house sizes internationally—and it’s not just because of McMansions.

America is a place defined by bigness. It is infamous, both within its borders and abroad, for the size of its cars, its portions, its defense budget—and its houses.

Rightly so: U.S. houses are among the biggest—if not the biggest—in the world. According to the real-estate firms Zillow and Redfin, the median size of an American single-family home is in the neighborhood of 1,600 or 1,650 square feet. About five years ago, Sonia A. Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Georgia, was working on a book about land-use patterns in the U.S., and when she tracked down the average size of dwellings for about two dozen countries, the U.S. came out on top. Her comparisons were rough because she’d cobbled together her data from various sources, but she found that American living spaces had a good 600 to 800 square feet on most of the competition.

For many participants, the program that provides health care to millions of low-income Americans isn’t free. It’s a loan. And the government expects to be repaid.

The folded American flag from her father’s military funeral is displayed on the mantel in Tawanda Rhodes’s living room. Joseph Victorian, a descendant of Creole slaves, had enlisted in the Army 10 days after learning that the United States was going to war with Korea.

After he was wounded in combat, Joseph was stationed at a military base in Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with Edna Smith-Rhodes, a young woman who had recently moved to Boston from North Carolina. The couple started a family and eventually settled in the brick towers of the Columbia Point housing project. Joseph took a welding job at a shipyard and pressed laundry on the side; later, Edna would put her southern cooking skills to use in a school cafeteria. In 1979, Joseph and Edna bought a house in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for $24,000.

Ivanka was always Trump’s favorite. But Don Jr. is emerging as his natural successor.

The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich Trump knows his clientele.

Curtained-off “private boxes” line the wall opposite the bar, inside of which are beds, and women, and scales to weigh gold powder, the preferred method of payment for services rendered. Word of the restaurant’s off-menu accommodations spreads fast. “Respectable women” are advised by The Yukon Sun to avoid the place, as they are “liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings.”